8:29 - here’s where Jon says “Ed Morden,” for those of you keeping score at home.

The Great Season Finales discussion:

Star Trek: TNG - “Best of Both Worlds (part 1).” Clearly one of the best season finales out there. I (Chris) was never a fan of putting a main character in danger for a cliffhanger - you knew there was no way they were going to remove Patrick Stewart from the show - but Picard getting Borged had implications and thankfully the series dealt with them as it went along rather than the episode just being resolved merrily.

The “Mulder buried in the train car” episode of X-Files was the season 2 closer “Anasazi” which was actually the first of a 3 parter. That was a long summer, waiting for that show to come back, even though (see above) there was no way they were killing off Mulder. Unfortunately with the X-Files, the set-ups were almost always far better than the resolutions. Mulder’s escape through a tunnel or something was deeply unsatisfying.

Space: Above and Beyond we’ve talked about at length before. The season 1/series finale was harrowing.

The Expanse is too recent a show for me to want to give spoilers for the end of season 1, but it definitely provided some answers to questions that had been out there for a long time while raising the stakes.

The 100 takes the “what you’ve known all along about this situation? Yeah, it’s really something else” approach to a season closer, which I always really liked (see Lost and The Good Place).

Lost’s season 3 closer “Through the Looking Glass” was definitely something that turned the established narrative on its head.

Millennium’s season 2 ended with a “global pandemic” and the wife of the lead character, believing herself infected, walking off into the woods leaving her husband and daughter safely behind. Much like X-Files though (unsurprising since it is from the same lineage) the resolution was disappointing (the pandemic turned out to be very localized and not all that severe. feh).